edit: to limit to one core: taskset 1 ffmpeg <rest of args> -- taskset is part of the util-linux package on Debian systems. You may also want to renice the process, setting its priority value to something in the positive range (sounds backwards, but lower nice value = more cpu time). As always, man taskset, man renice, man nice.

This is how you do what you want to do with ffmpeg from the shell -- implementing in PHP is left as an exercise for the reader.

Awww fudge! I was hoping for a ffmpeg-alternative :( and you can run that using the exec() or system() php functions. do you think i can limit ffmpeg to one core only? when it runs, it takes 90% of the CPU;s processing power....meanwhile apache lags/opens pages very slowly :S Thanks tho! :)
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BoRoNov 5 '10 at 23:54